Review: Good People

Good People
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
5 February 2012
Red Stitch
to 3 March
redstitch.net

Good People was nominated for Best Play at the 2011 Tony's.  It's damn good writing by David Lindsay-Abaire, and the Australian premiere by Red Stitch made me remember why this company is so damn good.

Margie (Andrea Swifte) lives in "Southie", a poor Boston neighbourhood where she's just been fired from her job at a dollar store by the son of an old friend (Rory Kelly). With a disabled adult daughter, a cow of landlady (Olga Makeeva) and no jobs around because of the recession, she's running out of choices, until she meets her teenage boyfriend (Dion Mills), who's now a wealthy doctor and married to a younger woman. He got out of Southie, so maybe he can help.

Lindsay-Abaire's script is full of screaming subtext and as allegiances change, it surprises as it holds onto its secrets. His characters are not nice people. Each struggles with happiness and is faced with wondering if life really could have been different.

Director Kaarin Fairfax grasps the tone perfectly by ensuring that the dark humour hurts. It's too easy to laugh at people who are answer "How's the wine?" with "How the fuck should I know", but the success of this production is that we're allowed to the see her desperation and understand why Margie behaves in ways that may be unthinkable to someone who can afford a theatre ticket and the time to indulge in such a middle-class pastime. There's a moment when a cheap trinket is broken and she yells, "I paid for that" and at once there's nothing funny about breaking something ugly and worthless. Fairfax ensures that the story and characters are more important than the performances, which allows us to be in this world without judgement.

Nonetheless, Good People is peopled by exceptionally good people. Andrea Swifte never lets us feel sorry for Margie, and Jane Montgomery Griffiths as Margie's mutton-as-lamb mate and Alexandria Steffensen as the new young wife bring understanding and complexity to characters that could easily be jokes.


Good People is a terrific start to Red Stitch's 2012 season.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com

Review: She's a Little Finch

She's a Little Finch
MKA
19 November 2011
MKA Pop-Up Theatre, Abbotsfod
to 26 November
www.mka.org.au

This year's indie darling company MKA have popped up in an about-to-be-gentrified Steiner school in Abbotsfod for their final 2011 season.  Following the success of MKA's  I Know the Writer season*, She's a Little Finch opens their short second season like a wake-up double espresso made by your favourite barista.

Josie's story is told in four chapters from different times, starting when she moves in with her uncle and his maybe-soon-wife, but she wants to see the lemon yellow paint for her bedroom and keep her zebra finch.

Melbourne writer Elise Hearst graduated from Creative Arts at Melbourne Uni, won the Monash University National Playwrights Competition and attended the Royal Court Theatre's Young Writer's Program in London. And her writing is beautifully dark, painfully funny and stays with you long after the play's end.

The best writers keep the truth of their story unwritten and ask unanswered questions.  Her dialogue is fresh and sounds natural because – like real life – no one says what they mean but makes their feelings clear. Hearst's characters's talk about juice, swing dancing, room service and fresh cannolli builds a subtle tension and fear that is allowed to explode and gently reveal itself.

Supporting and understanding the script, director Jacquelin Low and designer Michael Parry create its atmosphere, and the cast (Kerith Manderson-Galvin, Alexandria Steffensen, Lauren Urquhart and Tom Dent) find the honesty and pain in her subtext.

Without MKA, too many writers' works would not have the chance to be seen and to develop. This is the company to see to discover the writers and creators who are going to blow us away in the next decades and prove that the great Australian playwrights are nothing like Williamson or Murray-Smith.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com

* 15 awesome readings of new work. I missed 14 of them, but Declan Greene's Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Porn may be the best and meanest love story ever told.